“… hybrid compositions that are richly thought-provoking, environmentally aware but also crucially tuned to the long view of climate change ” Julian Cowley The Wire

Released on 31st May 2024 with Bristol’s TBC Editions, audiovisual composition Twittering Machines is now available to buy on vinyl, with screen printed cover and inserts based on the video projections for the live performance. Available on TBC Editions Bandcamp page – HERE – read more details about the piece at bottom of this page

“it’s when the composer splices together varied electroacoustic elements, with the B-side a mellifluous maelstrom of resonant metal surfaces building to an almost Sunburned Hand Of The Man-like climax, that the composition really catches fire” by Noel Gardner The Quietus

“she creates a rich meditation on the fragility of the ecosphere and the encroachment of environmental threats, gathering momentum as she goes” Richard Allen A Closer Listen

“What I like about these two parts of ‘Twittering Machines’ is their incredible vibrancy and energy, not staying for very long in the same place and using a variety of sounds and approaches to keep the piece moving… I also enjoyed that music never becomes too delicate, silent or fragile. Like nature should be, a colour mass of events, sounds, smell and all that, this music is too. At 45rpm, or 27 minutes, this is a short record with a great impact” FdW, Vital Weekly

“Both enlightening and unsettling – and affecting, too. The Morse code at the start is an arresting combination when paired with the birdsong, but as it dulls and the birds take over the sense of unrest is real, in spite of the ambience of the natural sounds… Twittering Machines is a powerful wake-up call, a reminder that nature – and birds in particular – are not to be taken for granted” Ben Hogwood, Arcana FM

“…this remarkable piece by Kathy Hinde… … is a kind of virtual forest canopy of chittering and trilling, both eerie and enthralling—a reminder, perhaps, never to take for granted the natural sounds around us.” Philip Sherburne Futurism Restated

Radio plays include extracts on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, Night Tracks and New Music Show, on BBC Radio 6 Music, Phil England’s ‘The Wire‘ on Resonance FM; various CAMP radio shows; Source FM “this is not a disco“; Radio Reverb Sound Laboratory; WORM radio Rotterdam; CITR FM, Bepi Crespan show; The Institute of Spectra-Sonic sound;

Twittering Machines is an audiovisual performance by Bristol-based artist/composer, Kathy Hinde, which won an Ivor Novello award in 2020 and has been presented worldwide following its 2019 premier at Mutek Montréal. This recorded version presents a single composition, split over two sides of vinyl. The piece begins with a study of the nightingale, a bird that sings at night, and of the disrupted environmental cycles that may threaten its future. It is released to mark the hundredth anniversary of Beatrice Harrison’s famous 1924 BBC broadcast of a wild nightingale singing with her cello, which drew attention to the bird’s already declining population, and was one of the main inspirations for Kathy’s piece.

Sonically and thematically, Twittering Machines is no pastorale, instead pointing to more unsettling entanglements of the human and the ‘natural’. In it, John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale, translated into morse code, taps out a shifting rhythm; perhaps a persistent distress call. The poem reflects Keats’ desire to escape into the hypnotic beauty of the nightingale’s haunting song; a symbol of beauty, nature, and renewal, yet also associated with solitude and a ‘cry for help’. Kathy chose to use the poem as a metaphor for humanity’s existential struggle with the climate crisis. Her attempts to manipulate the blips and beeps to simulate birdsong renders the morse code indecipherable, Keats’ poem slowly disintegrating into a swirl of non-verbal chirps and noises, as if resisting the mechanical and the linguistic. As the longform composition evolves, elements are drawn in from music boxes, bird imitation toys, singing bowls, gongs, synth, field recordings, as well as the voices of distinguished British ornithologist Peter Holden MBE and Bavarian bird imitator Helmut Wolfertstetter, cut onto dubplate. These multiple sound sources are sampled and manipulated live using a turntable, electronics and bespoke software, constellating in shifting, dreamlike patterns. Blurring natural, analogue and digital sounds, Twittering Machines evokes the restless chatter of modern information channels, the fragility of avian ecosystems, and the present danger of environmental collapse; as samples unwind to drone-speed, the composition morphs into a lament for our fast-dying planet.

Mastered by Maja Ratkje, this new recording is pressed on 12” vinyl in a screen printed package including inserts using stills from Kathy’s visual work with 16mm and digital video for the live project.